Initiation rites. Political language. Babies. Dietary stuff.

I read that there is a lot of concern about initiation ceremonies. This is not as a means of joining secret societies but apparently joining sports teams and clubs and societies at university. Some of the mildest seem to be just disgusting - drinks mixed with dog food - while many are just plain dangerous - swimming teams that tape bottles to the hands of new members. I don’t remember any of this from my time at university. Drinking games at parties, yes, but seriously dangerous stuff if you joined a club or society, no. Maybe I am just too old, for it seems that some of the dangerous stuff comes from films and from Youtube videos.

What a strange world!

Almost as strange as the political situation.

It’s very hard to keep up with what’s going on as MPs are expelled from the Conservative Party or walk across the House to join the opposition or resign as Amber Rudd has just done.

The language used by politicians themselves - Johnson apparently calling Corbyn a “big girl’s blouse” - and by those who write about the political situation is interestingly colloquial at the moment. Fintan O’Toole in the Observer wrote:

“Nobody with a stim of wit has ever believed that Johnson tells the truth about anything.”
While I can understand the gist of what he has to say, and even go along with it, I find myself wondering what a “stim” is. Is this an Irish expression? Mr O’Toole does write for the Irish Time after all.

Then Andrew Rawnsley’s comment and analysis headline today reads,
 “Like Macbeth, the PM is too stepped in blood to turn back. Where next?”

“Stepped”? Does he mean “steeped”? Maybe it’s a Shakespearean thing. He does refer to Macbeth, after all. So I looked it up and found that Macbeth says,

 "I am in blood
 Stepped in so far that should I wade no more.
 Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
But Macbeth says “ stepped in”, not just “stepped”. So I think Andrew Rawnsley has been a bit too clever there.

On the subject of Labour’s refusal to back a call for an early election, Andrew Rawnsley also writes, “Tories hope, and some on Corbyn’s from bench are nervous, that Labour will pay the price for appearing “frit”.” A little bit of northern English creeping in there.

Here’s something unrelated to the above. An Indian woman aged 74 has given birth to twins. A donated egg and her aged husband’s sperm, and of course modern medical techniques, made this possible. Asked about the care of the twins, given that the new parents are a little on the old side, they said it was in the hands of God. I must say that I like the mix of faith in both religion and modern technology!

Here are some related statistics, courtesy of today’s Observer:

• The previous record holder for the oldest women to give birth was a Spanish woman called María del Carmen Bousada de Lara, who was 66 when she had her twins. Her name alone is enough for me. 
•  Dawn Brooke, from Guernsey, was the oldest recorded woman to conceive naturally. She became a mother at the age of 59.

•  In 1765 the wife of Russian Feodor Vassilyev reportedly gave birth to her 69th child. I reckon she must have had a fair few sets of twins, even if she started having children at an early age, which is probably the case. No doubt she was married at a very young age. Even so, she must have spent most of her life pregnant.

•  In 2009 in California Nadya Suleman gave birth to a record eight children. Known in the media as Octomom, she has 14 children altogether.

And we thought our daughter was a little excessive as she is about to give birth to her fifth.

Further my having written about the eating disorder ARFID and the dangers of a severely restricted diet, here is something by Barbara Ellen:

 “Warning to lazy vegans: you may be harming yourselves.

 A study published in the BMJ says that while vegan and vegetarian diets are linked to a lower risk of heart disease, they may increase the likelihood of strokes, partly due to nutrient deficiency. Which reminds me that I need to embark on my clamoured-for food memoir: “Confessions of a Lazy Vegetarian”. The first chapter could be titled “The Crisp Years”, the second “Children of the Quorn” and so on.
My problem was that, as someone who turned vegetarian young because of animals (third chapter: “Virtue Signalling for Dummies”), I didn’t give much thought to nutrition. Actually, that’s a lie: I didn’t give any thought to nutrition. Hence, over the years, I’ve had some health problems that were most probably linked to being a gormless, vitamin-deprived vegetarian.
But that’s my own fault, isn’t it?
Vegetarians and vegans can’t blame their diets for health problems – they can only question if they’re eating properly. Vegetarians and vegans who are scrupulous about nutrition wouldn’t invite needless problems, while also reaping the genuine health benefits. The fact is, doing vegetarianism or veganism properly takes effort, which can be boring, but it must be done. Though really this applies across the board.
No diet (meat or meat-free) is automatically healthy – you always have to work at it.”

Which reminds me of when our daughter decided, aged 13 or 14, that she was an ethical vegetarian. We were prepared to support her. After all, we had been vegetarian for health reasons as well as ethical and environmental. Even now I don’t eat red meat. Our daughter, though, was difficult. Well, picky and particular. Being vegetarian for her meant eating almost nothing but Linda McCartney prepared packet vegetarian meals.

Nightmare!

Envirnmental anomalies, religious professionals, uniform stuff and strange portents!

Global warming stuff - Kebnekaise a mountain in Sweden has two peaks, the northern one reserved for experienced mountaineers and the southern one, glacier covered, suitable for properly equipped hikers. No doubt, as the mountain is inside the Arctic Circle and the Swedes are used to cold conditions, they only get properly equipped hikers, not like the loonies here who set off up mountains in the Lake District and in Scotland in unsuitable footwear and without proper waterproof and windproof clothing.

Be that as it may, the southern, glacier covered peak has always been the higher of the two, but now the ice is melting and it can no longer claim to be the winner.

We’ve been catching up on omnibus editions of The Archers and find that Shula is continuing to pursue her dream of becoming a vicar. I wonder if she knows how many of them are really poorly paid. The Archbishop of Canterbury is okay, from what I have read, with his £83,000 a year, plus a couple of big houses. Most ordinary vicars get a salary of £27,886 and housing thrown in, which is not bad I suppose, but around 3,000 are apparently “self-supporting” and rely on grants and charity handouts. Talk about taking a vow of poverty! Even better, the Church of England reportedly has an investment fund worth £8.3bn which pays asset management executives six-figure sums. I think old Jesus might have something to say about that!

Every so often we have a problem getting through passport control on the eGates with our fancy passports. Well, really Phil has more problems than I do. Now I read that in some cases this can be because there is a known criminal with the same name and the passport control chappies have to double check. Does Phil have a criminal doppelganger out there?

Almost everyone has successfully got back to school as far as I know. At least it is the case with our immediate family. Nobody took pictures of our family offspring in school uniform this year, thank heavens. Five-year-olds may look cute in school uniform but I still think it is unnecessary, but that is another issue. I read about a school in Niagara, Canada, where the school bus arrived 30 minutes late on the first day of term, not because of traffic problems but because the driver had to wait while doting parents took advantage of the school bus photo opportunity!

“Along with Halloween and the arrival of the first pool inflatables of the summer holiday season, “back to school” has become a communal moment when stories are shared around the campfire of social media”. That’s what I read.

And it gets better. Celebrity back-to-schoolers, accompanying their tiny offspring to their first day at school come in for further scrutiny. What to wear on such an occasion is all important. So we have been told that the Duchess of Cambridge, seeing Princess Charlotte into her first day at school, wore a Michael Kors silk dress - judging by the photo in the newspaper, Prince William made no effort at all, just an open-collared shirt and a sports jacket - while actress Sienna Millar wore something fancy by Mango. Oh, the ridiculousness of it all!

Meanwhile parents and pupil have been protesting outside a school in East Sussex because the school has introduced gender-neutral uniforms for all. What this means in practice is that everyone must wear trousers. I don’t see what the quibble is about. In the 1970s we campaigned for female staff to have the right to wear trousers at the school where I worked. But some mothers say it is an unreasonable demand. Perhaps they are insisting on their girls’ right to wear their skirts rolled over at the waistband to make them as short as possible Saint Trinian’s style. 

And finally, how about a two-headed snake? In New Jersey, USA, scientists have found a two-headed baby timber rattlesnake. They have named it Double Dave as it was discovered by two environmentalists both called Dave. Such snakes have difficulty surviving in the wild as they are quite slow-moving and therefore are vulnerable. So Double Dave is being taken into captivity.

Apparently the two heads of such snakes work independently and sometimes they fight each other for food, unaware that there is only one body for the food to nourish. Polycephaly as it is called is a similar development to conjoined twins, an embryo that has begun to split but then stops before fully dividing. It is quite rare, and two-headed creatures have often appeared in mythology as they are considered to be a portent of disaster in some cultures.

Now, what kind of disaster does this portend for the USA? I wonder!

Far-fetched goings-on!

Today I listened to the rain beating down when I awoke and decided that I did not feel like running in the rain this morning. My weather app promised some improvement later. This proved to be the case. So we went for a brisk walk instead - maybe not quite so energetic as a run but at least I had company on the walk.

In between times I spent some time being a unicorn. This is what happens when a three-year-old descends on you. I had to turn down her invitation to accompany her and her mother when they went to meet Daddy for a late lunch in Manchester. This led to some pouting, on part of the three-year-old, I hasten to add.

Having taken advantage of the gap in the dire weather, we came back and put ourselves masochistically through the process of booking flights with Ryanair. I am aware that it seems as though we have only been back in the UK five minutes, especially in Phil’s case, but experience tells us we should book early. Our return flights at the end of August / beginning of September cost us far more than anticipated because we were doing some last minute booking. We plan to be in Portugal for a chess event at the end of October, so booking now was a necessary evil if we wanted to travel at a reasonable price..

And evil is the word to describe it. I swear that the airline changes its policy from day to day. We had grown used to the fact that in order to guarantee a place in the overhead locker for a small carry-on 10k suitcase it was necessary to go for priority boarding. That would get you the small suitcase in the locker and a smaller piece if hand-luggage to go under the seat. Now it seems to have grown even more complicated however. The size of the under-the-seat has grown slightly. So out came the tape measure to check the size of various bags.

Presumably this accommodates people like me who might decide to travel really light. Then “priority boarding” has changed its name to something I have already forgotten and entitles you to a hold bag (20k), a small cabin-bag suitcase (10k) and the now slightly-increased-size under-the-seat bag. Of course each extra, such as actually reserving your specific seat adds a little something to the price.

So we juggled our requirements and finally booked flight there and back on our second attempt and after a good hour or maybe more of messing around on the airline’s website.

I was exhausted just watching Phil do the booking!

So there we are. All we need to do now is organise my travel to London for a visit to the southern branch of the family. And, of course, there is the small matter of buying bus tickets from Porto to Vigo to coincide with our flights, assuming they arrive on time.

Oh, the stress! How do people manage this and work full time as well?

So now it seems we will be out of the country for Brexit day, if that event happens as scheduled or if it happens at all. The whole shambolic affair is a little out of control as far as I can tell. And will we get back into the UK without problems?

In the meantime here is a link to the Guardian’s “Long Read” feature  describing the evil doings of the CIA back in the 1950, involving mind control experiments and LSD. And we think the government is up to dirty tricks nowadays!!!

Reading the article I was reminded of those programmes you come across on obscure TV channels in which someone tries to determine the exact spot where Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea.Finding the truth of this CIA matter seemed just as unlikely.

And then it included references to something that went on in 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit in the South of France in 1951. Known on France as the case of “Le pain maudit”, the cursed bread, it seemed to have involved the whole village having been given LSD. Mass hysteria and some deaths resulted from this. Now I spent time as a foreign language assistant not too far from Pont-Saint-Esprit at the end of the 1960s. I could have researched the story and written my dissertation about it had I known. 

Too late now. It’s all in the past!

Public family squabbles. Organisational stationery problems. And railway stations.

The mayhem continues. Now Boris Johnson’s brother has turned round and resigned his position in the government and stepped down from being an MP altogether. It’s pretty bad when your brother publicly separates himself from you. Families are, of course, quite notorious for divisions and differences of opinion but one quite so public as this is probably unusual. This is what happens when you all work in the same field, I suppose.

And we don’t seem any nearer to a solution.

In the meantime, we have been advised by a friend who is a GP that it might be a good idea to get our yearly flu jab sooner rather than later. The flu vaccination serum (is that the right word?) might well be in short supply post-Brexit. Just another little problem to contend with!

For several weeks we have been trying to bet hold of cheap mid-year diaries. Well, Phil has been enlisting my assistance to find one, or even two,  for him. Personally I have no objection to paying a little more for a particular brand of small diary to carry around with me in my handbag. But Phil favours a desk diary, week to view per double page, which he can keep on the desk (where else?) next to the computer. Then he wants a smaller one in which he can keep a list of chess fixtures that he has to organise or oversee the organisation of.

Usually we have found such diaries for just a few euros in the Chinese bazaars in Vigo where they sell just about everything from rubber bands to rubber mattress protectors, candles to casserole dishes, pens and pencils to pots and pans. This year we found none at all, despite visiting several such emporia at our end of town.

Out and about with daughter here in the UK, I have found a range pretty pink and fluffy diaries at pretty pink and fluffy prices. Clearly I have not been to the right shops. Time to go into town and visit the cut-price stationery stores!

Over in Paris they seem to be having a little contretemps about the revamping, or perhaps that should be the “relooking” to use a franglais word, of the Gare du Nord, one of the city’s big railway stations. It must be going on for half a century since I was there, so no doubt there have been changes that I am quite unaware of. Now there are plans to create a vast shopping space, a glass structure with tens of thousands of square metres of shops, walkways, split-levels and 105 escalators.

Apparently the Gare du Nord, one end of the Eurostar run, has long been compared unfavourably with St Pancras, the other end of the run. Andy Street, the former head of John Lewis who is mayor of the West Midlands, even had to apologise to France in 2014 after calling the Gare du Nord “the squalor pit of Europe” compared with what he called the “modern, forward-looking” St Pancras.

The thing is that we have grown used to big stations being rather like shopping malls. Manchester’s Piccadilly Station is very mild compared with Euston Station in London but would-be passengers can obtain different kinds of refreshment, browse a number of shops, and buy reading matter from W H Smith, travel necessities from Boots the Chemist or last minutes gifts from Accessorise. And coming back from a journey you can pop into Sainsbury’s to buy milk and bread and so on, or in my case at the start of my journey a bottle of prosecco to share with my daughter-in-law.

But the French seem not to like the idea. Well, we don’t know what the aftual Frenchman in the street thinks but leading French architects have said it would be “unacceptable”, “indecent” and a “serious offence to transport users”. They also said that the vast volumes of the “beautiful” train hall would be “denatured” by adding high walkways. They warned of committing a “serious urban error” in the form of a giant shopping centre that risked killing smaller local trade in the Paris region.

But maybe we should support their objections because the renovation will include working spaces – which some have suggested would allow companies to relocate from the UK after Brexit but stay close to the Eurostar!!

Oops! There’s that Brexit problem again!

Bad manners and grumpiness running the country!

Listening to the lunchtime news I heard the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition shouting at each other, each accusing the other of having no plan for what to do with Brexit. Which is probably quite true!

But it’s the shouting that always astounds me, especially with the volume of yelling and catcalling from the benches. Do they shout at each other more and make more of a pantomime of the whole thing since television cameras were allowed into the hallowed halls? Quite possibly! Everyone is an “actor” seeking a sound bite.

Mind you, there are times when having cameras in the Commons is no bad things. Here is a link to an article about the Rees-Mogg person slouching rather arrogantly on his bench during debate. Is this what you expect from the Leader of the House? Or is this how an expensive education teaches you to comport yourself?

Nowadays, with instant comment on social media to everything that goes on, I suspect that behaviour, in the Commons and out, has deteriorated. Journalist Nesrine Malik, writing in Tuesday’s Guardian, seems to agree with me:-

“How overblown fears of censorship have normalised hate speech and silenced minorities.
 By Nesrine Malik
 Tuesday 3 Sept 2019

“When I started writing a column in the Guardian, I would engage with the commenters who made valid points and urge those whose response was getting lost in rage to re-read the piece and return. Comments were open for 72 hours. Coming up for air at the end of a thread felt like mooring a ship after a few days on choppy waters, like an achievement, something that I and the readers had gone through together. We had discussed sensitive, complicated ideas about politics, race, gender and sexuality and, at the end, via a rolling conversation, we had got somewhere.

In the decade since, the tenor of those comments became so personalised and abusive that the ship often drowned before making it to shore – the moderators would simply shut the thread down. When it first started happening, I took it as a personal failure – perhaps I had not struck the right tone or not sufficiently hedged all my points, provoking readers into thinking I was being dishonest or incendiary.

In time, it dawned on me that my writing was the same. It was the commenters who had changed. It was becoming harder to discuss almost anything without a virtual snarl in response. And it was becoming harder to do so if one were not white or male.”

Coming back to this post after an afternoon out at my eldest granddaughter’s house, I listen to more havoc going on in parliament. It’s not all going Mr Johnson’s way but he is still blustering.

No idea where it will end.

Dietary stuff and babysitting.

I’ve just read about another eating disorder. We’ve had anorexia and bulimia around forever it seems. Now comes ARFID (avoidant restrictive food intake disorder). Sufferers become sensitive to the taste, texture, smell and appearance of certain types of food.

 There’s a young man in Bristol who has refused to eat anything but sausages, chips and crisps for around a decade. As a result he is now blind and deaf. Apparent.y such a restricted diet affects the optic nerve and other bits of brain function. It’s not junk food per se that causes the problem, although it’s pretty bad, but eating nothing but causes manor trouble. You need to take vitamin and other supplements to make the diet somewhere near balanced.

 And I think of the students I taught who survived on a diet of “chip balms” in Salford, “chip balms” being a bread bun stuffed to the gulls with chips - carbohydrate sandwiches. Most of them did go home to a fairly normal meal in the evening though. And I think of my own granddaughter who refuses to eat any fruit or vegetables. Just handling them gives her the jumjams. And, yes, she has a range of health problems but her diet is helped by vitamin supplements. She seems to have survived reasonably well to 16 and has a decent clutch of GCSE grades to her credit.

 Today my smallest granddaughter, three years old yesterday, has spent the day with me. Settling down to watch Frozen for the umpteenth time in her case - she knows all the songs - she informed me that my television is very small. It’s a perfectly good size. It’s just that in her house they have a HUGE screen, obscenely so in my opinion. But it seems to be the modern things to have in your living room the sort of screen pubs use to show football matches.

 So I have spent part of the day playing with My Little Pony toys. I now know the names of a whole range of small plastic toys, whose names I never learnt when my own daughter played with them. But then she only had one or two. The range was not so great then. Neither was there a TV series with intricate stories. However, the smallest granddaughter plays imaginatively with her little friends. She understands all sorts of stuff about their comolex personalities. So I am not complaining.

 We set out for a walk, only to have the rain start to fall on us. This led to some protest as I had to manhandle her into a waterproof suit which she objected to on the grounds that it is “too lumpy”.

 So it goes.

Some thoughhts about music, novel-writing, education and the influence of political comments.

Further to my remarks yesterday about listening to Ana Belén, here is a link to Ana Belén singing García Lorca’s “Pequeño vals vienés”. It was translated into English, set to music and recorded by Leonard Cohen. Ana Belén uses Leonard Cohen’s musical arrangement. And here is Leonard Cohen’s version, for comparison purposes. Leonard Cohen so admired García Lorca and his poetry that he named his daughter Lorca. Not used as a name in Spain, as far as I know, it works in the English-speaking world.

Lorca’s poetry lends itself to musical interpretation. I have been hunting through our CDs for my copy of Ana Belén’s “Lorquiana”, a collection of Lorca poems set to music. So far I have been unable to locate it. This is the problem with having too many CDs.

Is it truly possible to have too much music though?

Here's another question: is it ever too late to publish your first novel? I read yesterday that playwright Alan Ayckbourn, 83, has just published his. A novel set in a dystopian future, it began life as a six-hour two-part play, which was receieved with little enthusiasm by the critics. One of them suggested it would work better as a novel. And voilà! Next question: would just any old 80-year-old have received a publishing deal? Or do you have to be already established?

I have been in communication with one of my companions from the Italian conversation class, who is asking if I know when classes start again. I am unsure why I have become the fount if all knowledge but there we go. All I really know is that it is not this week as our teacher is still posting photos from Crete and other exotic places. As I pointed this out we had a further discussion about the security of posting your photos for potential burglars to see!! Hmmm!

No doubt our Italian teacher will be back in the UK this week, she also does some work at a high school and schools are due back later this week.

Out and about today I have seen lots of families clearly taking advantage of a last chance to get out and about together, walking the bridle paths and towpaths. All good stuff!

More back to school stuff. Some parents are finding the cost of school uniformas ridiculously prohibitive. Some state schools have a uniform list that runs to £250 before adding on shoes and coat! Having contributed to the cost of uniform for my daughter’s offspring I know that this is true! Crazy stuff!

About university-level education, here is a link to an article about a young lady who opted not to apply for Oxford, preferring instead to go to Leeds, where the Fine Arts course she wanted to study seemed better. Good for her! A young lady who knows her own mind! It was interesting that one of the reasons she gave for eschewing the advantages and connections an Oxford degree might have given her was that so many of the current government are Oxford-educated and she does not want to be associated with the likes of them.

Talking of Oxford-educated politicians, here is a link to an article which maintains that anti-Muslim attacks increased as a result of a certain Mr Johnson’s burqa comments.

 Enough said!